Weekly Poem for 09 October 2017

This Is Not A Rescue

I want to tell you it will not be as you expect. For years you have hammered in stakes, handed men the rope and said consume me with fire. Most have run – one does not burn a witch lightly. This one is water. He’ll unbind you, take your hands in his and say remember how you love the ocean?Come with me. You’ll go to the beach on a cloudy day, watch foam rise from the sea’s churn until sun appears. In turn you’ll say let’s go in and even though he hesitates, this man will kick off his shoes and wade to his shins. Jellyfish, shot with pink like satin dresses, will dance between you, flash iridescent. His body is all whorls and planes like smoothly sanded planks used to make a boat, his ears are pale shells you hear the waves in, he smells of sandalwood and salt, his eyes are ocean. He’ll spot the pebbles that in secret you have sewn into your skirts and give you his penknife to unpick them. You can’t swim with those. He’ll teach you to skim. The pebbles break the surface like question marks. You’ll throw each last one in.

This Is Not A Rescue is a sparkling debut collection from Carmarthen-born Emily Blewitt, featuring poems on varied subjects from being a ‘woman poet’ to the heroes of Jane Austen. There are also some winning, unusual love poems and work inspired by crows and a couple of characters from ‘Star Wars’. Read more about the collection on the Seren website.

Emily Blewitt read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and has an MA in Film and Literature from the University of York. In 2010 she returned to Wales to begin a PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she specialised in poetic representations of pregnancy in nineteenth-century and contemporary women’s writing, graduating in 2016. She has published poetry widely, her work appearing in The Rialto, Prole, The Interpreter’s House, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Furies, Cheval, Nu2: Memorable Firsts, and in Brittle Star. The title poem from her debut collection, This Is Not ARescue, was Highly Commended for best individual poem in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and is published in TheForward Book of Poetry 2017. You can read more about Emily’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.

Seren has been publishing poetry for 35 years. We are an independent publisher specialising in English-language writing from Wales. Seren’s wide-ranging list includes fiction, translation, biography, art and history. Seren’s authors are shortlisted for – and win – major literary prizes across Britain and America, including the 2014 Costa Poetry Prize (for Jonathan Edwards’ My Family and Other Superheroes). Amy Wack has been Seren’s Poetry Editor for more than 20 years. You can find more details about Seren on the publisher’s website and follow Seren on Twitter and on Facebook.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

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